the term "classical music" did not exist until 1930s

Quote:“In the history of the music we now call "classical," new music was in fact the norm until at least the first third of the 19th century. Before that -- in Mozart's time, for instance -- hardly anyone performed old music. Yes, a few musty connoisseurs remembered Bach and Handel, but everybody else liked newer stuff. They all played new string quartets at home, and went out to see the latest operas. This didn't change until the 1830s, give or take a decade, when emerging groups of high-culture sophisticates began actively to perform the music of the past. And this, I suspect, is where our problem started -- with the idea that "classical music" (a term that never existed in Bach's or Mozart's day) was something special and privileged, something far loftier than any music we'd normally hear in our everyday lives. As the 19th century progressed, more and more old music got played, until by around 1870 it found a home in the deepest heart of musical life. But even then new music didn't stand apart in any special way. You can see that very clearly if you read music critics of the time. Take George Bernard Shaw, who reviewed concerts in the 1890s. He wrote about the Brahms Requiem, about new works by Verdi, Dvorak, and Grieg, about an absurdly hyped new opera called Cavalleria rusticana, and about premieres by Massenet and Tchaikovsky (along, of course, with pieces by composers we don't remember anymore). But -- except in the special case of Wagner, whom he loved, but who, even a decade after his death, still sounded startling to many people -- Shaw never talked about new music as if it was any problem for him or anybody else. He liked some of it; some of it (most notoriously, anything by Brahms), he didn't like. But he wrote like someone in our age going to the movies; nothing he reviewed got treated specially simply because it was new.”

This makes sense, as up until the 1900s popular music was European folk, hillbilly or variations on the waltz/proto-big-band sound.

When it became clear that this style was taking over ("prole drift"), musicians needed a way to keep classical from being dumbed down. Outside of Gershwin, Copland, Dvorak and other partial intelligences, they succeeded.

This makes sense, as up until the 1900s popular music was European folk, hillbilly or variations on the waltz/proto-big-band sound.

When it became clear that this style was taking over ("prole drift"), musicians needed a way to keep classical from being dumbed down. Outside of Gershwin, Copland, Dvorak and other partial intelligences, they succeeded.